the real – Page 4

foucault copjec

Christopher Lane, “The Experience of the Outside: Foucault and Psychoanalysis” Lacan in America edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, New York: Other Press, 2000. 309-348.

the subject is constructed by forces lying beyond conscious apprehension and social meaning. 321

The difficulty of establishing where psychoanalysis stands relative to experience and its interpretation not only haunted Foucault’s career but partly determined it. One strand of Foucault’s intellectual project was aimed at complicating historical materialism by building on Nietzsche’s work. Another strand—tied conceptually to the first—focused on challenging the intellectual sovereignty in France of Jean-Paul Sartre. But a third and less successful strand devolved on establishing the importance of psychoanalysis for modern thought without at the same time endorsing Lacan’s “return to Freud.”

In refusing the psychoanalytic argument that sexuality isn’t determined wholly by discourse and social practices, however, Foucault could understand the ontological difficulty of sexuality only the way antiquity represented this phenomenon — that is, as an “effect.. . of errors of regimen [les erreurs de regime]” (UP, p. 16; UPS, p. 23).

Foucault’s insistence even here in approaching sexuality from primarily a culturalist perspective exacerbated his self-acknowledged difficulties. Yet his commitment to engaging some of the psychic repercussions of subjectivation — which dovetailed into his study of the modes of subjection (mode d’assujettisement, G, p. 353) — ironically obliged him to return to psychoanalysis for a better understanding of their diverse effects. I am suggesting that throughout Foucault’s career this pincer-like approach to psychoanalysis overdetermined his perspective on subjectivity. While his first published essay critiqued works by Ludwig Binswanger and Freud, for example, it didn’t dispute the appearance or effect of the unconscious. 328

While subtle differences therefore arise between The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975) concerning the role of the dispositif … the thread linking these books is Foucault’s suggestion that “[t]he individual is the product of power.” The underside to this conception of subjectivity — and, perhaps, the obvious extension of it is the near-metaphysical idea that subjectivity, once freed from outside regulation, would lack “inner conviction” (MF, pp. 89,42). This idea surfaces periodically in Foucault’s 1954 essay on dreams, and it culminates logically with the demand that subjectivity be let alone, whether to silence, abstraction, or pleasure. 331

Bersani valuably represents Foucault’s claims about subjecti vation in the following way: “The mechanisms of power studied by Foucault produce the individuals they are designed to dominate” (S, p. 3).

“The fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis,” adds Zizek, “is that what we call ‘reality’ constitutes itself against the background of [symbolic] ‘bliss,’ i.e., of such an exclusion of some traumatic Real. This is precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says that fantasy is the ultimate support of reality: ‘reality’ stabilizes itself when some fantasy frame of a ‘symbolic bliss’ closes off the view into the abyss of the Real.” Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 118

… psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialist accounts of reality and consciousness, as well as from related critiques of reality’s many shortcomings. By insisting on the ego’s basic ” [in]aptitude for dealing with reality,” Bersani — like Freud and Lacan — shows us why the subject’s alienation is neither explained nor repaired by altering the diverse forms of political oppression that impede and partly shape us, an argument quite different from the frequent and unjustified claim that psychoanalysis is uninterested in our oppression.

Owing to their faith in the underlying influence of these external causes on the subject, Foucauldian and materialist approaches to subjectivity argue that factors such as gender, ethnicity, and even sexuality are egoic effects of varied, contradictory, and unjust social demands.

From this perspective, however, the ego is invested with an ability to modify, subvert, and even repair these demands in order to diminish their effects and sometimes render them meaningless.

The Psychic Life of Power displays at the outset ambivalence about the psychoanalytic argument that only a nonsocial factor — the drive — is capable of determining psychic life. More important for us here, The Psychic Life of Power restates the logic of external causation, which paradoxically restores in principle the forms of social influence that 1 am challenging here. For invaluable discussion of this point, published just before this essay went to press, see S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), especially pp. 247-312.

Although this faith in the influence of external causes relies erroneously on the ego’s capacity for congruency with the outside, I should stress that in opposing this faith I am
not refuting the influence of external factors. To do so would undercut my emphasis on the asymmetry of psychical and physical reality; it would reproduce another form of voluntarism, generating precisely the characterizations of psychoanalysis that I am objecting to here. The fantasy that the ego determines consciousness slips easily into solipsism and epistemic relativism, a fantasy that we simply make our own reality.

I am objecting instead to the crass suggestion—voiced repeatedly by constructivists and Foucauldians—that subjectivity is merely an “effect” of discourse, a suggestion that renders subjectivity politically transparent, devoid of drives and unconscious causes. 343

This suggestion culminates in a conceptual deadlock, in which social practices and power are caught in a circular relationship that thwarts the possibility of transformation. Let us iterate that Foucault wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge precisely in an atttempt to shatter this deadlock.

One way that psychoanalysis departs conclusively from materialism is by insisting that we can’t test our reality without confronting our perception of the external world. According to Freud, the structure of loss that frames our perception and desire serves as a guide for all subsequent perspectives on reality.

As he argued in “Negation,” building on a related and now famous claim in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:

The first and immediate aim … of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to re-find such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there.” 66

S. Freud, “Negation,” Standard Edition 19:233-238, 1925, paraphrasing his earlier claim in Three Essays and the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard Edition 7:

“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (p. 222).

This statement shows us clearly why Freudian psychoanalysis differs from the conservative idea that therapy consists in adapting the patient’s ego to reality.

For Freud and Lacan, the idea of patient adaptation was preposterous, because egregiously coercive. Indeed, the very question of adaptation returns us to The Order of Things, where Foucault usefully points up a conclusive split between psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Poised between rationalism and unreason in Madness and Civilization, Freudian psychoanalysis surfaces in The Order of Things and even Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality as one of the primary fields that avoids, and even preempts, the coercive logic of psychiatry.

It is psychiatry, Foucault insists, that claims the patient must sacrifice his or her reality for pre-existing forms of social reality.

Lacan of course agreed, arguing in the 1930s — long before Foucault began publishing — that the very idea of “sacrifice” is both manipulative and delusive, insofar as “adaptation” merely substitutes one fantasy about reality for another.

JOAN COPJEC SPEAKS

Contrary to the common misperception, reality testing is not described here as a process by which we match our perceptions against an external, independent reality.

In fact, it is the permanent loss of that reality—or real: a reality that was never present as such—that is the precondition for determining the objective status of our perceptions.

Not only is the real unavailable for comparison with our perceptions but, Freud concedes, we can assume that the latter are always somewhat distorted, inexact. [Read My Desire, p. 233]

Copjec shows us here why psychoanalysis and historicism offer quite different perspectives on reality; she illustrates too that by highlighting the profound repercussions of Freud’s argument about reality, Lacan completely discredited the idea that reality can ever be reparative for the subject.

“In the name of what is social constraint exercised?” he asks in Seminar VII. “[Reality isn’t just there so that we bump our heads up against the false paths along which the functioning of the pleasure principle leads us.”

“In truth,” Lacan continues, “we make reality out of pleasure” (EP y p. 225), a statement inverting the standard materialist claim that we extract whatever pleasure we can from a reality that pre-exists us.

That the ego exists in relation to a structural méconnaissance overturns all existing claims about false consciousness: “By definition,” Lacan says in Seminar II, “there is something so improbable about all existence that one is in effect perpetually questioning oneself about its reality.”

… Foucault’s and Lacan’s rather different perspectives on the subject’s structural relationship to reality and axiomatic dependence on resistance. To my mind the kernel of this difference arises in Freud’s claim, near the end of his study of the Wolfman, that “[a] repression is something very different from a condemning judgement.”

What Freud brings to our attention here is that repression’s importance lies less in what we contain, than in what we can’t evade.

“I’d say that that is the very essence of the Freudian discovery,” remarks Lacan in Seminar I.

To put this another way, repression, for psychoanalysis, doesn’t signify what we can possess of the past; it dramatizes the effort it takes to accomplish forgetting, to remove or dislodge us from a past—and thus a history — that threatens to overwhelm us.

This claim points up a form of difficulty that isn’t altered or resolved by will, whether individual or collective, and the difficulty helps us refute the simplistic objection that psychoanalysis is ahistorical. … our failure to rid ourselves of the past is one of the factors binding us involuntarily to history.

rothenberg dimly lit garage

Imagine that you walk into your dimly lit garage and discover a mess. The place is so jumbled that you cannot even distinguish one thing from another.

Now, let’s say that, suddenly, the walls of the garage disappear, and you discover that this jumbled mass stretches in all directions.

One final gesture: remove yourself from the scene, so that you cannot serve as a reference point or means of orientation. No up nor down, no inside nor outside. No spaces between things, no background against which they stand out, no standpoint from which to assess their relationships.

It is as though everything is glued to everything else in what Copjec calls the “realtight.”

I will follow Alain Badiou in calling this state of affairs “being,” where things have no particular identity or relationship to one another, where there is no subject, and where orientation is impossible. In this state, no thing is determined because no thing has any relation to anything else.

[…] The simple addition of a formal property, the empty set, which has no substance in and of itself, negates the state of sheer being that attends each thing-as-such. It does so by establishing a minimal point of orientation – like making a small cut in a sheet of paper. Once this cut is added, then “things” can bear some minimal relation to each other – they all have a relation to this minimal point of orientation. The “cut” of the empty set creates a vector, and with this stroke, things precipitate into a world of identities, properties, and relationships – as objects.33

mcgowan fantasy 2

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013.

The encounter with the traumatic gap in signification is inherently a political event because it exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and makes evident the fundamental symbolic lie. At the point of this encounter, the symbolic law’s hold over the subject evaporates as its ultimate groundlessness and meaninglessness are revealed.

Subjects invest themselves in and submit to the symbolic law insofar as they believe in its ability to confer meaning and identity, and this is precisely what the encounter with the traumatic gap gives the lie to. Thus, fantasy’s ability to lure the subject toward the encounter with this trauma attests to the political importance of fantasy.

Fantasy assists public ideology by obscuring the dimension of the trauma, but in this very act of obscuring it, fantasy stages an encounter with it. In this way, the qualities that allow fantasy to assist ideology allow it to subvert ideology as well. 216

The political task as it might be envisioned by psychoanalytic thought entails not attempting to eliminate fantasy but transforming our relationship to it.

Fantasy functions in an ideological way when it works to cover over the structural necessity of absence within the social order, but fantasy appeals to us because it also conveys an experience of loss or absence that we can access nowhere else. One could say that we are never more inauthentic than when we fantasize but never more authentic at the same time. In order to provide the pleasure that comes from overcoming absence, fantasy must introduce and narrate loss. As it does so, it allows the fantasizing subject to experience the impossible loss that founds subjectivity itself. In every fantasy, this loss is enacted, whether implicitly or explicitly.

The political task involves fostering the recognition that we enjoy our fantasies for their depiction of loss rather than for the illusion of return. 221

mcgowan pt 2: real encounter between enjoying subject and enjoying other

McGowan, Todd Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, 2013

Traditional authority figures ruled through prohibition: they demanded that subjects sacrifice their enjoyment for admittance into the social order. This type of paternal authority governs through the establishing of distance — distance between the authority figure and the subject, as well as distance between the subject and enjoyment.

The new authority, however, abandons distance for the sake of proximity. Rather than confronting us with an impenetrable demand that remains out of our comprehension, he assaults us with displays of his enjoyment. 103-104

Whereas prohibition creates a social authority that exists at a distance from the subject — or that installs distance within all of the subject’s relationships – the absence of an explicit prohibition leaves the contemporary subject in the proximity of a real other. 🙂 And this is a good thing! Get close to the real other.

The social field of prohibition is a terrain stripped of all enjoyment where everyone is reduced to the form of symbolic identity. Without this terrain (which is the contemporary situation), one encounters the other beyond its symbolic identity, the enjoying other. It is others listening to music with their headphones, talking loudly on a cell phone, eating excessive amounts of food, communicating in an unknown language, or emitting an unusual odor. Public displays of enjoyment occur with increasing frequency today because the dominant form of authority does not function through prohibition. Rather than violating the ruling social imperative, the public display of enjoyment heeds it. The result is rampant anxiety. Without the distance from the other requisite for desire, one experiences the anxiety produced by its presence.
104

The ethical position, for psychoanalysis, necessarily involves the embrace of this anxiety — and this is at once the path to enjoyment 105

🙂 embrace the anxiety, embrace this brush with the real other. Screw the symbolic! It only produces a desiring subject. No?

mcgowan neighbour other enjoyment

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. 2013

🙂 Here 100 pages in, the neighbor or other that enjoys, doesn’t include us and we get paranoid or at least uneasy. We feel insignificant, but when we go to sporting events and music concerts we identify with the enjoyment that we see thereby “avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment.”

The neighbor or real other is the enjoying other.

The other’s mode of enjoyment marks the other as absolutely singular. Everything else about the other — emotions, thoughts, desires, achievements, and so on — can be understood and communicated through the order of signification or language. We can share all these experiences through the mediation of the signifier, which informs them in their very origin. The other’s enjoyment unlike everything else about the other, disturbs us when we encounter it because it does not take us into account. While the other’s symbolic identity includes us as the source of the look that validates it, the other’s enjoyment not only ignores us but seems to go so far as to occur at our expense. When we encounter the enjoying other, we experience our own isolation, our own absolute insignificance for the other.

The encounter with the enjoying other occurs at moments when a radical cut emerges between the other and the subject. Events such as basketball games and rock concerts allow spectators to identify with the enjoyment that they see and thereby to avoid the trauma of the encounter with the other’s enjoyment. In contrast, the shared laughter of people speaking a foreign language, the rumor of an orgy at a secret society, or the strange noises that a toddler hears behind the closed door of the parental bedroom do not provide any opening to the outsider. One hears the enjoyment without any possibility of partaking in it through the act of identification, and one almost inevitably imagines that one’s exclusion is part of the enjoyment. The distinction between an enjoying other enjoying itself at my expense and an enjoying other indifferent to me becomes negligible. The pertinent fact is the other’s enjoyment that doesn’t include me. 102

stavrakakis the real

As soon as we recognise the centrality of dislocation in our experience, we can easily understand the play between possibility and impossibility governing the field of social construction. If it is construction that makes possible the sedimentation of social reality, this reality is always threatened by an encounter with impossibility, with the part of the real that escapes the boundaries of construction.

… dislocation and the lack it creates in our representations of reality, is exactly what stimulates our new attempts to construct new representations of this real.

This play between possibility and impossibility, construction and dislocation, is structurally equivalent to the play between identification and its failure which marks the subjective level. However, this argumentation is still located at the level of a certain phenomenology of the social.

How can we further approach the status of this element which stimulates our desire to represent it through social construction, but which, due to the impossibility to represent it fully, returns to dislocate all our social constructions?

It is here that Lacanian theory can be of great help. In Lacan, the cause of this play between possibility and impossibility is, of course, the real. This is then the paradox of Lacans relation to constructionist argumentation. Lacan is not a mere constructionist because he is a real-ist; that is to say, in opposition to standard versions of constructionism Lacanian theory of symbolic meaning and fantasmatic coherence can only make sense in its relation to the register of a real which is radically external to the level of construction.

This Lacanian real-ism is, however, alien to all other standard versions of epistemological realism in the sense that this real is not the ultimate referent of signification, it is not something representable, but exactly the opposite, the impossible which dislocates reality from within.

The real does not exist in the sense of being adequately represented in reality; its effects however are disrupting and changing reality, its consequences are felt within the field of representation. 69

stavrakakis 1999 dislocation and the real

Indeed it is possible to trace in constructionist argumentation a certain moment when`something external to social construction makes its presence felt. It is the moment in which a problem or a crisis dislocates our social constructions. … This conceptualisation of the moment of the meaningless event, of the accident or the disaster that destroys a well-ordered social world and dislocates our certainties,
representing a crisis in which we experience the limits of our meaning structures, is something we cannot neglect. 67

It is only in Laclaus argumentation that this moment of negativity acquires central importance. What Laclau shows is that the level of the
objective, social reality itself as a sedimentation of meaning, exists in an irreducible dialectic with the moment(s) of its own dislocation. Social reality is eccentric to itself because it is always threatened by a radical exteriority which dislocates it.

Furthermore, this moment of dislocation is exactly what causes the articulation of new social constructions that attempt to suture the lack created by dislocation.

Since dislocation denotes the failure and subversion of a system of representation (be it imaginary or symbolic) by not being representable, since dislocation creates a lack in the place of a discursive order, dislocation can be conceived as an encounter with the real in the Lacanian sense of the word.

The lack, however, created by dislocation produces the need (rather the desire in our Lacanian vocabulary) for its filling. Hence the dual character of dislocations: If on the one hand, they threaten identities, on the other, they are the foundation on which new identities are constituted (Laclau, 1990 New Reflections:39). 67-68

The real is exactly what destroys, what dislocates this fantasmatic reality, what shows that this reality is lacking. 68

If reality constitutes the symbolically constructed and fantasmatically supported part of objectivity, the real also belongs to the objective level, it is what exceeds the domesticated portion of the objective. It is exactly what accounts for the failure of all symbolic representations of objective reality: the object which accounts for the failure of every neutral-objective representation (Ž Plague of Fantasies 1997:214). 68

The real is not
an ultimate referent of external reality but the limit which hinders the neutral
representation of external (symbolic) reality (Ž Plague 1997:214).

It is thus revealed in the failure of symbolisation itself. It is the radical externality which does not permit the
internalisation of the socially constructed reality, it is exactly what keeps identification from resulting in full identity.

Nonetheless, the real cannot be conceived independently of signification: it is revealed in the inherent failure/blockage of all signification, it is
exactly what reveals all symbolic truth to be not-all, it can only be thought as the internal limit of the symbolic order. The real cannot be symbolised per se but is shown in the failure of every attempt to symbolise it (Ž Plague:217). It is an internally shown exteriority surfacing at the intersection of symbolisation with whatever exceeds its grasp. 68

Stavrakakis 1999 why do we need an exteriority, a real

The blind spot of constructionism … is that on the one hand it reduces everything to the level of construction and, on the other hand, it occupies a metalinguistic or essentialist position outside construction.

Thus, in order to de-essentialise constructionist argumentation we need to relate the production of reality constructions to something external to the level of construction itself.

This exteriority, however, cannot be a transparent exteriority, a new essence which is objectively accessible. If that was the case we would have a return to traditional essentialism and objectivism. In other words, this outside cannot be a base on which the superstructure of reality constructions is erected.

It has to be an exteriority impossible to represent, to construct at the level of symbolic meaning, but also impossible to avoid. …

But why is that exteriority necessary? It is not only because otherwise social constructionism becomes essentialist. It is also because any tautological entrapment into the world of social construction is incapable of providing an account of the cause that governs the productions of social constructions of reality.

The crucial question that social constructionism is incapable of answering is the following: if the level of construction is engulfing the totality of the real, what stimulates the production of new social constructions?

This cause has to be something external to the level of construction itself otherwise the argument enters into a tautological spiral. We have established then so far that in order to de-essentialise the constructionist argument and reveal the logic that governs its production and articulation, without however reoccupying a traditional essentialist position, we have to locate an exteriority which serves as the cause of our social constructions, an exteriority which is in itself unrepresentable but constitutive of the play of representation.

What can this element be? Answer: Dislocation

Stavrakakis 1999, 66-67

Kant phenomenal noumenal split subject Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek‘s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

That is to say, if psychoanalysis is indeed correct to maintain that the subject ontogenetically emerges through and comes to constitute itself by a sort of radical, primordial gesture of negating rejection (whether as Freud’s primal/primary repression as original Verwerfung or Verneinung, Lacan’s “cut” of symbolic castration, or Julia Kristeva’s abjection) , then feelings of revulsion toward the corporeal substratum of the mortal body essentially are indicative of the presence of a form of subjectivity resistant to being collapsed back into its material foundation. (Johnston ŽO 25)

The subject is inherently barred from any form of phenomenal self-acquaintance in which it would know itself as finite in the ontological-material sense. The nothingness fled from, the void that Kant allegedly labors so hard to avoid, is nothing other than the very absence of the subject itself, the negation of the insurmountable “transcendental illusion” of its apparent immortality. (31)

The split within the structure of the subject that Zizek credits Kant with having discovered is that between the phenomenal and noumenal dimensions of subjectivity, namely, between the subject as it appears to itself in an experiential fashion (i.e., through conceptual and spatio-temporal mediation) and the subject as it exists/subsists “in itself.”

The subject an sich that makes experience possible cannot itself fall, as a discrete experiential, representational element, within the frame of the field it opens up and sustains (a point already grasped by Descartes in his second meditation). Hence, Kant famously speaks of “this lor he or it (the thing) that thinks”. The noumenal subject is just as much of a permanently shrouded mystery as things-in-themselves. The entire thrust of the first Critique (particularly the “Dialectic of Pure Reason”) is to establish the epistemological grounds for forbidding any and every philosophical reference to the noumenal realm beyond the familiar limits of possible experience. (Johnston ŽO 30)

According to Zizek’s heterodox juxtaposition of Kant and Lacan, the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy has direct relevance to this splitting of subjectivity between, on the one hand, the noumenal subject of (unconscious) enunciation and, on the other hand, the phenomenal subject of utterances (as determinate signifier-predicates). [ŽO 32]

If… one bears in mind the fact that, according to Lacan, the ego is an object, a substantial “res,” one can easily grasp the ultimate sense of Kant’s transcendental turn: it desubstantializes the subject (which, with Descartes, still remained “res cogitans,” i.e., a substantial “piece of reality”)—and it is this very desubstantialization which opens up the empty space (the “blank surface”) onto which fantasies are projected, where monsters emerge. To put it in Kantian terms: because of the inaccessibility of the Thing in itself, there is always a gaping hole in (constituted, phenomenal) reality, reality is never “all,” its circle is never closed, and this void of the inaccessible Thing is filled out with phantasmagorias through which the trans-phenomenal Thing enters the stage of phenomenal presence—in short, prior to the Kantian turn, there can be no black hulk at the background of the stage. (Zizek Enjoy Your Symptom 1992, 136) [Johnston ŽO 32]

Elsewhere Zizek draws out the consequences of this, maintaining that every mediated identity, all signifier-predicates appended to the original nothingness of subjectivity in its raw negativity, are “supplements” aiming to “fill out this void”:

Lacan’s point here is that an unsurmountable gap forever separates what I am “in the real” from the symbolic mandate that procures my social identity: the primordial ontological fact is the void, the abyss on account of which I am inaccessible to myself in my capacity as a real substance — or, to quote Kant’s unique formulation from his Critique of Pure Reason, on account of which I never get to know what I am as “I or he or it (the thing) which thinks [Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding), welches denkt]”

Every symbolic identity I acquire is ultimately nothing but a supplementary feature whose function is to fill out this void. This pure void of subjectivity, this empty form of “transcendental apperception,” has to be distinguished from the Cartesian Cogito which remains a res cogitans, a little piece of substantial reality miraculously saved from the destructive force of universal doubt: it was only with Kant that the distinction was made between the empty form of “I think” and the thinking substance, the “thing which thinks.” (Zizek Metastases of Enjoyment 1994, 144) Johnston ŽO 32-33

Thus, the entire range of significations and images proposed by the subject to itself in response to the question of self-identity (“Who or what am I?”) falls under the heading of transcendental illusion. That is to say, these fantasmatic productions striving to seal this crack in reality are semblances. And yet they are the inevitable results of a structurally determined dynamic rooted in subjectivity’s internal division: “The subject is this emergence which, just before, as subject, was nothing, but which, having scarcely appeared, solidifies into a signifier” (SXH99). ŽO 33

subject-as-negativity two intersecting lacks

What if the negativity of Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian subjectivity (as the monstrous cogito, the horrible void of the Thing, and the terrifying abyss of nocturnal dismemberment) is a symptomatic ideality-as-idealization derived from and conditioned by a contingent yet a priori material foundation (what, in psychoanalysis, would be designated as a violent “reaction-formation”) ?

Is the subject-as-negativity a response to its corporeal Grund (ground), to a primordially chaotic and discordant Real that produces its own negation immanently out of itself? Are Zizek’s otherwise inexplicably odd choices of adjectives here indicative of such a link, of a thinly concealed umbilical cord tethering the (pseudo)immateriality of the modern subject to a dark base rendered obscure through a forceful disavowal/abjection? 22

Lacan furthers this Freudian line of thought through his portrayal of the libido in the myth of the lamella (a myth Zizek cites repeatedly). Sexuality is depicted as a frightening monster-parasite that aggressively grafts itself onto the being of the individual and drives him or her toward death.

In the same seminar in which the lamella is invoked (the eleventh seminar), Lacan also sketches a logic of two intersecting lacks, a Real lack (introduced by the fact of sexual reproduction) and a Symbolic lack (introduced by the subject’s alienation via its mediated status within the defiles of the signifying big Other).

The Real lack is nothing other than the individual’s “loss” of immortality due to its sexual-material nature as a living being subjected to the cycles of generation and corruption, albeit as a loss of something never possessed except in primary narcissism and/or unconscious fantasy.

Symbolic lack serves, in away, as a defensive displacement of this more foundational lack in the Real.

Not only are psychoanalytic psychopathologies painful struggles with both of these lacks, but “it is this double lack that determines the ever-insistent gap between the real and the symbolico-imaginary, and thus the constitution of the subject” (Verhaeghe Collapse of Function of Father 2000, 147).

One possible manifestation of the neurotic rebellion against this fundamental feature of the corporeal condition is a strong feeling of disgust in the face of all things fleshly, of everything whose palpable attraction and tangible yet fleeting beauty smacks of a transience evoking the inexorable inevitability of death (an attitude that Freud comments on in his short 1916 piece “On Transience”). [Johnston ŽO 23]

barring of the Real origin of experience Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.

According to this reading, Schelling basically agrees with Kant that attributing a notion such as “existence” to the noumenal ground underlying reality is erroneously to apply a concept forged within the boundaries of already constituted experience to the pre-experiential foundation of this same experiential field (in short,it amounts to a category mistake). Like Kant, Schelling forbids using discursive concepts to analyze and characterize the Real.

However, unlike Kant, Schelling refuses to conclude that the question as to the origin of experience (for instance, the enigma of how a thing affects the receptivity of the senses so as to become an object) is therefore meaningless and not worth asking.

Žižek identifies as the nature of Schelling’s peculiar radicalization of Kant (a radicalization crucial to allowing for the possibility of forging a transcendental materialist account of subjectivity). Žižek alludes to the idea that both Kant and Schelling uncover (although the former, in restricting himself to an epistemological investigation, fails to appreciate the true significance of this discovery/insight) the fact that being itself is shot through with antagonisms and tensions, riddled with cracks, fissures, and gaps (rather than being something homogeneous and harmonious, an ontological plane placidly consistent with itself). What one could call this “barring” of the Real is absolutely essential to Žižek’s philosophical project,a project centered on deploying and defending, in the midst of a prevailing postmodern doxa hostile to the very notion of subjectivity, a robust theory of the subject. Johnston ŽO 77

preontological Johnston

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008

Grund, rather than being the hard, ontological substance behind the ephemeral facade of experience (as it’s been characterized here thus far), is, in fact, “preontological“: “The enigma resides in the fact that Ground is ontologically non-accomplished, ‘less’ than Existence, but it is precisely as such that it corrodes the consistency of the ontological edifice of Existence from within (Žižek 1996b,62; Žižek 1997a,7).

In The Abyss of Freedom, Žižek proclaims that “the Ground is in itself ontologically hindered, hampered, its status is in a radical sense preontological — it only ‘is’ sous rature, in the mode of its own withdrawal” (Zizek1997a,6).

And in The Plague of Fantasies, he utilizes this interpretation of the Schellingian Real as preontological (instead of it being the ontological per se) to identify Schelling as a thinker who completes Kant’s insight into the “ontological incompleteness of reality” 76

Sous rature is a strategic philosophical device originally developed by Martin Heidegger. Usually translated as ‘under erasure’, it involves the crossing out of a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place.

Žižek quote

German Idealism outlined the precise contours of this pre-ontological dimension which precedes and eludes the ontological constitution of reality… Kant was the first to detect this crack in the ontological edifice of reality, if (what we experience as) “objective reality” is not simply given” out there, “waiting to be perceived by the subject, but an artificial composite constituted through the subject’s active participation — that is, through the act of transcendental synthesis — then the question crops up sooner or later what is the status of the uncanny X which precedes transcendentally constituted reality? It was Schelling, of course, who gave the most detailed account of this X in his notion of the Ground of Existence.. .the pre-logical Real which remains for ever the elusive Ground of Reason which can never be grasped “as such,” merely glimpsed in the very gesture of its withdrawal (Žižek 1997c, 208) 77